After their father passed away in March 2024, his son and daughter turned to the mortuary in San Antonio to handle his cremation. The arrangement was straightforward: the mortuary would cremate their father and return his cremains to the family, and the family alone was authorized to receive his ashes.
The mortuary did not do that. Instead of releasing their father’s cremains to the family who was entitled to them, it handed his ashes to a person who had no authorization to receive them. The family was not told of the error when it happened.
To this day, the family has still not received their father’s cremains. They do not know where his ashes are or whether they will ever get them back. What should have been a final act of care, returning a father to his children, instead left them with an ongoing, unresolved loss on top of their grief.
Releasing a person’s cremains only to the family authorized to receive them is one of the most basic responsibilities a cremation provider has. There is no closer trust in this line of work, and there is no undoing it when it is broken. The mortuary was authorized to release these cremains to the family alone and gave them to someone else entirely.
The failure was not just the initial mistake. The petition alleges the mortuary failed to keep the records that would let it safeguard and track whose cremains were whose, failed to exercise ordinary care to avoid mishandling them, and failed to notify the family of the error after it gave their father’s ashes to the wrong person, leaving the family to absorb the consequences of a mistake they did nothing to cause.
We filed suit in Bexar County and brought claims for negligence and negligent misrepresentation and for violations of the Texas Deceptive Trade Practices Act, including representing that the mortuary’s services had qualities and benefits they did not have, breaching the implied warranty that the cremation and final-disposition services would be performed in a good and workmanlike manner, and engaging in an unconscionable course of action. We made the mortuary account for releasing the cremains to an unauthorized person, for failing to safekeep and track them, for failing to keep proper records, and for failing to tell the family of the error.
A family that trusts a mortuary to cremate their father and return him to them is entitled to exactly that. Handing his ashes to a stranger, and leaving the family without their father with no answers, is a failure that cannot be undone, and the mortuary had to answer for it.
We filed suit in Bexar County and brought claims for negligence and negligent misrepresentation and for violations of the Texas Deceptive Trade Practices Act, including representing that the mortuary’s services had qualities and benefits they did not have, breaching the implied warranty that the cremation and final-disposition services would be performed in a good and workmanlike manner, and engaging in an unconscionable course of action. We made the mortuary account for releasing the cremains to an unauthorized person, for failing to safekeep and track them, for failing to keep proper records, and for failing to tell the family of the error.
A family that trusts a mortuary to cremate their father and return him to them is entitled to exactly that. Handing his ashes to a stranger, and leaving the family without their father with no answers, is a failure that cannot be undone, and the mortuary had to answer for it.
